Songfacts®:

• This is a suite of nine different songs that close out the second Beastie Boys album, Paul's Boutique. Instead of developing each song separately, they took the fragments they had for each and strung them together, which is what The Beatles did when they had unfinished songs for their Abbey Road album. The nine sections are listed like this on the album:
  
  a. "59 Chrystie Street"
  b. "Get on the Mic"
  c. "Stop That Train"
  d. "A Year And A Day"
  e. "Hello Brooklyn"
  f. "Dropping Names"
  g. "Lay It on Me"
  h. "Mike On The Mic"
  i. "A.W.O.L."
  
  The sections vary in length from 48 seconds ("Mike On The Mic") to 2:22 ("A Year And A Day") and total 12:33.
• A bouillabaisse is a stew with lots of ingredients thrown in. It's often used as a metaphor for something that's made up of lots of disparate parts, like this song.
• In the Beastie Boys Book, group member Mike Diamond wrote about this song: "We could have spent time working on them and developing them more fully, instead we decided to shove them all together into one medley and call it a bouillabaisse... coming from hardcore, we always loved the economy of super-short songs."
• The title of the first section, "59 Chrystie Street," is a reference to the apartment the group shared when they were just starting out. They lived at 59 Chrystie Street in the Lower East Side of Manhattan.